Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  “Why wasn’t I notified of this request?” Houser asked.

  “Sir, you are the deputy commander for intelligence of all these agencies,” Patrick said. “I thought you would have been notified every step of the way.”

  “I mean, why didn’t you notify me that you were going around my office for support on an Air Intelligence Agency tasking?” Houser asked angrily.

  “You had already disapproved my request, sir.”

  “And why did you not inform Eighth Air Force that you were going to go around them?” Houser asked. “Did you not receive the directive from General Zoltrane that all requests for operations originating in Eighth Air Force go through his office before going outside the command?”

  “Yes, sir, I did,” Patrick responded. “But as I understand it, the Air Battle Force reports to Eighth Air Force. My request for support did not go outside the command until General Luger upchanneled it to Air Combat Command.”

  “Didn’t you expect that General Luger would go outside the command to get permission to execute the mission?” Houser asked. Patrick did not reply. Houser nodded knowingly, then added, “Or were you hoping that he wouldn’t upchannel your request, but just go ahead and launch the mission without permission from his superiors?” Again Patrick did not respond. “Well, it’s good to see that someone in Brad Elliott’s old organization is obeying orders.

  “General McLanahan, I am going to give you a direct order, so as not to create any confusion or misunderstanding,” Houser went on. “You will confine your work and your communications to Air Intelligence Agency units only. If you need information from agencies or sources outside of AIA, you will forward the request to me or General Nowland first. Under no circumstances will you request information or pass information outside AIA without permission from my office. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” Patrick replied simply. “May I ask why, sir?”

  Heads snapped from Houser to Patrick and back to Houser in surprise at the question. Houser’s eyes blazed, but his voice was surprisingly calm. “It’s simple, General McLanahan—I don’t trust you anymore,” he said. “You see, while it is technically correct that you can request intelligence data from any source to create your work product, I’m afraid that you will be using a multitude of unorthodox or nonsecure sources and then not sharing the information with AIA, or not even notifying AIA that you have obtained this information. By doing this you compromise security and break the chain of custody of classified and extremely sensitive information.”

  “I assure you, sir, that I would never—”

  “I don’t need your assurances, General,” Houser interjected. “Around here assurances are made with actions, not words. You’ve been here only a short while, but you’ve already proven you can’t be trusted with following our procedures and directives. You give me no choice. My order stands. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. General, I’d like to see your plans for covert field action against the four targets you mentioned, but don’t count on having the operation approved anytime soon. General McLanahan, the information you’ve given us is interesting, but I don’t find enough specific information to support any ground-reconnaissance action. You still have not given the staff any information on where those Backfires came from, only guesses and speculation—and frankly, your ultimate conclusion is pretty far-fetched, bordering on irresponsible. We need to have a talk about your thought processes—maybe you’re not cut out to run the Air Intelligence Agency after all. We’ll see about that. In any case, I can’t present that conclusion to Eighth Air Force and expect anyone to take it seriously.”

  “Sir, if you’re not comfortable presenting my findings to Eighth Air Force or Air Combat Command, I’m prepared to do so,” Patrick said firmly.

  “That’s not the way we run things here, General McLanahan.”

  “Sir, you can’t just sit on the data we’ve collected. Your job is to collect information and present analysis to—”

  “Don’t tell me my job, McLanahan!” Houser snapped. “Your job is to shut your damned mouth and do as you’re ordered! Is that clear?”

  Patrick glared at Gary Houser for several seconds, then replied, “Yes, sir.”

  “Colonel Griffin can take the rest of the staff reports. I may ask him to do so from now on,” Houser said angrily. “In the meantime you’re dismissed.” Patrick pushed his classified reports and photos on the table before him to Griffin, stood at attention, then departed. When he did, Houser said, “Colonel Griffin, plan on taking over the Nine-sixty-sixth shortly. McLanahan’s on his way out.”

  Patrick ignored the surprised stares of his office staff as he hurried into his office and slammed the door shut. He hung up his Class A uniform jacket on the coatrack behind his door, poured himself a cup of coffee, dumped it out, grabbed a bottle of water instead, and nearly squished it as he tried to open the cap. He finally flung himself onto his chair and was on the phone moments later.

  David Luger picked up the secure phone and could barely wait for the encryption circuits to lock in before speaking. “Patrick—”

  “Houser ignored my report,” Patrick said heatedly. “He’s not going to send in any recon personnel.”

  “Patrick, listen—”

  “Dave, I’ve never been so damned frustrated in my whole life,” Patrick moaned angrily. “Houser threw me out of his battle-staff meeting. He’s probably going to throw me out of the Nine-sixty-sixth, if not the entire Air Force….”

  “Patrick, listen to me,” Dave said. “We’ve been studying the imagery from the NIRTSats today, and—”

  “Were you able to move the top constellation?” Patrick asked. “We need better images of Yakutsk. I have a feeling that’s going to be the key. We should keep an eye on Bratsk and Aginskoye, too, but all the activity up in—”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Patrick, so just listen!” Dave interjected. “We moved the second constellation like you asked, and the orbit dropped down to around eighty-eight miles, and it’s only going to be aloft for another few hours, but we finally got some good shots of Yakutsk, and—”

  “Good job. What did you—”

  “I’m trying to tell you, Muck It looks like half the Russian air force is parked there all of a sudden,” Dave said. “We counted sixteen Tu-16 Blinder tankers and—get this—twenty-four Ilyushin-78 tankers. They only have about thirty in the whole fleet!”

  “My God,” Patrick said. “Ninety percent of the Russian tanker fleet is on one base, in the middle of nowhere in Siberia! Something’s going on. What about—”

  “I’m getting to that, too, Muck,” Luger said breathlessly. “We spotted twenty-four Blackjacks at Blagoveshchensk. We haven’t verified if they’re all different airframes, but they’re sitting there being loaded with some kind of weapons we haven’t identified yet—probably cruise missiles.”

  “We’ve got to alert Air Force.”

  “That’s not all, Patrick. We counted at least twenty Backfires out in the open at Bratsk, Novosibirsk, and Aginskoye—that’s at least twenty bombers at each base. They’re being loaded, too. And they have huge fuel-drop tanks on their external hardpoints—they’ve got to be five or ten thousand pounds apiece, maybe larger. I mean, all these planes appeared out of nowhere! Twenty-four hours ago there was nothing—today, boom, the entire Russian bomber fleet is being readied for takeoff. And we’re only counting the ones we can see—there might be twice that number in shelters or hangars or dispersed to other bases we’re not watching. Where in heck did they all come from?”

  “I’m sure they’ve been there for a long time, Dave—we just weren’t looking for them until now,” Patrick said. “Did you report this to anyone else yet?”

  “It just crossed my desk, Muck.”

  “Can you transmit it to me?”

  “It’s on the way.”

  At that same moment, Patrick received a message on his computer with the image files. “I got them. Hold on.�
� Patrick punched in a telephone code for the battle-staff area. Colonel Griffin picked up the phone. “Tagger, I need to speak with General Houser right away. I’m e-mailing you photos just taken from the two NIRTSat constellations. The Russians are on the move.”

  “I’ll try,” Griffin said, and he put the line on hold. But moments later he came back on: “The general said not now, Patrick. I’m looking at the images. I see lots of planes, Patrick, but these are raw images. We need analysis and verification before we can present it to the staff.”

  “Tagger, these images were verified by the intel guys at Air Battle Force,” Patrick said. “The location and identification data have been verified. It’s real, Tagger. Houser has to look at them now.”

  “Hold on.” But the wait was even shorter. “I’ll be right down, Patrick,” Griffin said. “The general wants me to go talk to you.”

  “This can’t wait, Tagger. I’ll come up there.”

  “Don’t, Patrick. Sit tight. I’ll be right there.” And he hung up.

  Shit, Patrick thought, now I’ve succeeded in getting Trevor Griffin kicked out of the battle-staff meeting also. But this was too important to just sit on. “Houser won’t look at the imagery, Dave,” Patrick said to David Luger when he got him back on the line. He thought for a moment, then said, “I’m going to send a message to the secretary of defense’s office and let them know what’s happening. They’ll have to contact NORAD to activate the North Warning System, OTH-B, and put every fighter they can find on five-minute alert.” But at the same time as he said those words, he knew it was going to be an almost impossible job to convince anyone that the threat was great enough to warrant activating one of the pillars of the Cold War: ADC.

  Years earlier the continent of North America was defended by the Air Defense Command, or ADC, which was a joint U.S.-Canadian integrated system of military and civilian ground-based radars and military jet-fighter interceptors that stood poised to stop an attack by enemy bombers or cruise missiles. Its parent organization, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, still existed, but “aerospace defense” had been replaced with “air sovereignty,” which generally dealt with detecting and interdicting drug smugglers. Since the late 1980s, the threat that Russian bombers would launch cruise missiles against the United States had all but disappeared, while drug smugglers had virtual free rein over America’s skies, so any resources set up to detect and defend against obsolete Russian bombers was shifted to detect, track, and interdict smugglers.

  Along with squadrons of jet fighters stationed in Alaska, Canada, and the northern United States, the ADC used a series of long- and short-range unmanned radar sites to detect unidentified aircraft. Called the North Warning System, this system replaced the 1950s-era Defense Early Warning, or DEW Line, consisting of manned radars in Alaska and Canada. The ultimate radar system was deployed in the late 1980s: Called OTH-B, or Over-the-Horizon-Backscatter radar, it could detect aircraft as far away as three thousand miles by bouncing radar energy off the ionosphere. In ideal conditions, OTH-B radar operators in Colorado could see Soviet bombers taking off from their Siberian bases. Along with the radar net, there were fighter interceptors on round-the-clock alert, ready to hunt down and destroy any unidentified aircraft. At one time there had been a dozen bases and many dozens of fighters on twenty-four-hour alert.

  But as the threat diminished, so did readiness. OTH-B shifted from a full-time system to part-time only, and finally it was placed in “ready” mode, meaning it could be reactivated if needed. The North Warning System radars shifted to part-time mode as well, to reduce annual maintenance and operating costs. Finally, one by one, the fighter-interceptor squadrons were inactivated, disarmed, reassigned to drug-interdiction duties, or placed on “generation recall” status, meaning that the fighters could be placed on the line only after long days of preparation. No one cared: The Russians had only a handful of nearly obsolete bombers that were capable of launching ineffective, inaccurate, and unreliable cruise missiles; the Russian deterrent lay in its arsenal of land-and sea-launched ballistic missiles; the United States had even reactivated and modernized its anti-ballistic-missile defense system.

  The problem was soon obvious: Could the air-defense network in North America be reactivated quickly and effectively enough to stop a modern threat? Cranking up the Air Defense Command system was only practiced twice a year, and even so it seemed like a lost and arcane art. Patrick had no idea how to go about ordering an ADC reactivation—and he doubted if it could be effective enough to stop a massive Russian attack against the United States such as the one they were seeing develop right now.

  “What do you want me to do, Muck?” David Luger asked.

  “You need to get your surveillance and intelligence data over to Air Force as soon as possible,” Patrick replied, “because when I hit SECDEF with my concerns, they’re going to want proof.”

  “Patrick…Muck, what in hell do you think is going on?” Luger asked. He sounded more scared than Patrick had heard him sound in a long time. Despite his traumatic recent history, David Luger was one of the most unflappable—many called it “emotionless”—persons he knew. Luger possessed a well-trained scientific mind. Everything could be explained, even forecast, by using the proper mixture of research, reasoning, and theory. He never worried about anything, because his finely tuned brain started working on a problem the moment it presented itself. But for any man, especially someone like Dave Luger, the reality of what he knew and the thought of what could happen were finally too much for him to contemplate rationally and analytically.

  “Dave…”

  “I’m looking at the pictures and the analysis, Muck, and I can’t fucking believe what I’m seeing!”

  “Dave, keep it together, buddy,” Patrick said evenly. “I need you one hundred and ten percent on this.”

  “What in hell can we do?”

  “The first thing we need to do is turn on all the air-defense infrastructure in North America, and do it immediately,” Patrick said. “Next we need to begin twenty-four/seven surveillance of Yakutsk and all the other bases where bombers have been appearing. I need eyes inside those bases, especially Yakutsk. The tankers are the key, and it looks to me like Yakutsk is turning into tanker city. I’m going to talk to the Air Force and get them to crank up the readiness posture, but we need to take a look inside those Russian bases immediately, and the Air Battle Force is the best-positioned unit to get in there. It would take a week just to convince the CIA that what we’re looking at is real.”

  “I’ve already received permission to forward-deploy Hal and Chris to the region,” Dave said. “We’re going to send them to Shemya—five hours one way by tilt-jet, but it’s the best we can do unless we get some support from U.S. Special Operations Command or the Air Force.”

  “Do whatever you can to get the mout there, as fast as you can,” Patrick said. “If you can get in contact with someone at the Pentagon, maybe SECDEF’s office directly, we might be able to implement it.”

  “What is General Houser going to do with the pictures we got from the NIRTSats?”

  “Nothing, until he’s told to do something with them,” Patrick responded. “That’s why it has to come from the top down, and higher than Eighth Air Force or Air Combat Command—Houser might even be able to shrug off STRATCOM. Get moving, Dave, and let me know if you make any progress.”

  “Will do, Muck,” Luger said, and disconnected the secure transmission.

  Patrick began another secure telephone call to the secretary of defense’s office, then hung up the phone before the encrypted connection could go through. Although he had met and briefed the SECDEF, Robert Goff, on more than one occasion, their encounters had been mostly negative—Patrick was usually being reprimanded for some action he undertook with less than full authority. He was losing friends and allies fast, and a phone call to SECDEF’s office, in violation of a direct order issued just a few minutes ago in the presence of the rest of the Air Intelligen
ce Agency staff, was not going to win him any more. But this had to be done.

  Instead he initiated a secure call to the commander of the Air Warning Center of the North American Aerospace Defense Command at its command-and-control center at Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, Colorado, deep inside the underground military base. The Air Warning Center, or AWC, was responsible for monitoring the periphery of the United States, Canada, and parts of Central America and the Caribbean for unidentified aircraft—including cruise missiles—and passing information to the Cheyenne Mountain Command Center. The Air Warning Center controlled the ground-based radars operated by NORADand also collected data from ground, sea, and airborne military-fighter control radars; other surveillance systems, such as ground-and ship-based radar balloons; Homeland Security radar systems; and civil air-traffic-control radars. Patrick’s 966th Information Warfare Wing routinely passed information to AWC on the status of military forces in Russia and on events around the world, which might give AWC a heads-up in adjusting its surveillance to counter enemy incursions.

  After several long, excruciating minutes, he was put through to the AWC Charlie-crew commander, Lieutenant Colonel Susan Paige. “It’s nice to finally talk with you, General McLanahan,” she said after the secure connection was made and verified. “We’ve received the regular information updates from the Nine-sixty-sixth, and we’re very impressed with the quality of work coming from your office. I’d like to—”

  “Colonel Paige, I have information provided me by Air Battle Force that shows that Russia may commence a strategic air attack against the United States at any time,” Patrick said. “I’m recommending that NORAD implement full air-defense measures immediately, including a full recall and activation of all northern interceptor units and round-the-clock activation of North Warning and OTH-B. It’s vital that—”

  “Who gave you this information, General? Who is this Air Battle Force?” Patrick knew she was stalling for time—she would be hitting a hot key on her computer that would be tracing and recording this call and perhaps notifying the senior controller at the Command and Operations Center of Patrick’s information—or of a crank phone call. After Patrick briefly explained, Paige said, “General McLanahan, you need to take this information to Air Intelligence Agency and have General Houser message—”